1. PSY402 Theories of Learning
Chapter 11 – Cognitive Control of Behavior (Cont.)

2. Learned Helplessness

3. Learned Helplessness Theory
Seligman – depression is learned.
Depression occurs when people believe:
Failures are due to uncontrollable events.
Failure will continue as long as events are beyond their control.
Depression arises from helplessness.

4. Animal Research Step 1 -- three groups of dogs:
Inescapable shock – no control.
Escapable shock -- terminated if the dog pressed a panel.
No shock
Step 2 – 10 trials of signaled avoidance training in shuttle box.
2/3 of inescapable shock dogs did not learn to jump during step 2.

5. Step 1
Step 2

6. Dogs Fail to Escape

7. Helplessness in Humans
Hiroto – three groups of college students:
Uncontrollable group – wrongly told that pushing button would end noise.
Escapable group – pushing button ended noise.
Control – no noise.
Tested using finger shuttle box.
Uncontrollable group did not escape

8. Human Results Mimic Depression
Depressed (no noise) and Inescapable Noise conditions
Non-Depressed Escapable Noise and no noise conditions

9. Characteristics of Helplessness
Motivational impairment – unable to initiate voluntary behavior.
Mice in water maze.
Nonspecific – carries over to a variety tasks and test situations.
Intellectual impairment – incapable of benefiting from future experience – even if they jump, don’t learn.
Emotional trauma – negative affect.

10. Studies of Depressives
Show similar results to learned helplessness studies.
Depressed individuals do not escape noise, responding like inescapable non-depressed individuals.
Depressed individuals do not adjust likelihood of succeeding upward when they experience success.
They credit chance not skill.

11. Criticisms of Seligman’s Theory
There is more to depression than learned helplessness.
Helplessness subjects described the task as a skill task, even though acting as if it were a chance task.
Failure to replicate performance deficits in humans – facilitation of performance instead.
Results may be due to personal attributions.

12. Attribution Theory Attribution = the perceived cause of an event.
Causal attributions of failure have three dimensions:
Internal-external – internal traits or characteristics vs environmental forces
Stable-unstable – past causes will persist vs new forces will determine future outcomes
Global-specific – outcome relates only to one task vs outcome effects everything.

13. Attributional Model of Depression
Internal
External
Dimension
Stable
Unstable
Global
I’m unattractive to men
My conversation some-times bores men
Men are overly competitive with intelligent women
Men get into rejecting moods
Specific
I’m unattractive to him
My conversation bores him
He’s overly competitive with women
He was in a rejecting mood

14. Two Kinds of Helplessness
Personal helplessness – an individual’s inability causes failure.
Universal helplessness – the environment is structured so that no one can control future events.
Abramson -- both kinds lead to depression.
Vary on external-internal dimension.
Low self-esteem only with personal.

15. Severity of Depression
Depression can be transient if attributed to global but changing conditions.
Severe depression occurs when attributions are:
Internal
Global
Stable
Better if external, specific, unstable.

16. Hopelessness Depression
Hopelessness – the expectation that desired outcomes will not occur.
Learned helplessness -- no control over undesired outcomes.
Accounts for anxiety without depression.
Anxiety – possibility that a person may have no control over negative events.
Depression occurs when certain.

17. Pessimism and Optimism
Langer suggests perceived control is basic to human functioning – mastery, competence.
Negative explanatory style – hopeless style predicts susceptibility to depression.
Positive explanatory style – optimists are hopeful, feel they can control events, tend to be more successful, more healthy.
They are not depressed when life goes wrong.

18. Learned Hopefulness
Seligman believes a more positive attributional style can be taught.
Enhancing positive attributional style in depressed patients decreased their symptoms.
Changing the attributional style of college students via a workshop & ongoing coaching prevented development of depression.

19. Biological Changes
Weiss has suggested that repeated exposure to uncontrollable stress causes biochemical changes in people and animals.
Rats showed decreased feeding & sex drive, less grooming, lack of voluntary response, early morning wakefulness – signs of depression.
Related to increased activity in locus coeruleus and increased glutamate – similar to depressed individuals.

20. Cognitive View of Phobia
Bandura – two kinds of expectancy maintain a phobia:
Stimulus-outcome expectancy – about the nature of the stimulus. A statistics class will be aversive.
Response-outcome expectancy – about the likely result of behavior. I cannot pass the statistics class.
Why does phobia lead to avoidance behavior with negative outcomes?
Self-efficacy expectancy – belief that one can or (with phobia) cannot execute a particular action.

21. Self-Efficacy Expectations
Types of information used to establish self-efficacy expectations:
Personal accomplishments, success.
Task difficulty, amount of effort.
Observations of success/failure of others – vicarious modeling.
Emotional arousal – we feel less able to cope when agitated or tense.
High self-efficacy predicts approach behavior.

22. Criticisms of Efficacy View
Efficacy expectations may be epiphenomenal (not causal) – they may arise with anxiety but have no effect on responding.
Three types of anxiety:
Cognitive – affects self-efficacy
Physiological – affects physiology
Behavioral – directly influences responding.
Lang – contribution of each depends on prior experience and the situation.

23. Remainder of Chapter
Concepts and comparison of human and animal learning are part of PSY 334.
This material will not be on the final exam.